How Do you protect against Piracy?

Hi guys,

I just went on and tested freshkiller, and although it’s a good piece of soft, there’s no stopping these guys. Most of the links don’t go through because the addresses aren’t in the database, and even if they were it’s virtually impossible to stop this.

Has anybody ever found a way to protect their items from getting stolen like that? Serial numbers and so on…?

Cheers

If you can work out a way around piracy;
You will go down in history
Be famous beyond belief
Have a never ending amount of money
And many, many sexy and rather disturbing messages through your profile everyday.

You will not find a way around piracy, simple as, when something is on the internet, it’s everywhere. You have no way to prevent this.

You can ask users for their download code to check they have bought it, who knows if they’ve used it more than once or not? You can’t know.

Imagine you set out two months worth of work, just to give it away for free, allowing anyone to download your hard work, free and easy for a bit of publicity?
It’s a good marketing strategy and a lot of people do it. Think about that before setting every moment trying to fight piracy. My themes and code snippits are probably getting downloaded elsewhere, nothing I can do, and there is nothing I’m going to do.

That’s life, it’s unfair.

Yeah, thanks Ben. Nice way of seeing the full half of the glass with the publicity thing. We’re worrying about this a lot, while the Envato Marketplace people should worry much more than us. It’s our items that get pirated, but it’s a bucket load of their money people are stealing as well, so don’t really see why there hasn’t been found a way to at least limit the extent of this.

BenSheppard said
If you can work out a way around piracy;
You will go down in history
Be famous beyond belief
Have a never ending amount of money
And many, many sexy and rather disturbing messages through your profile everyday.

You will not find a way around piracy, simple as, when something is on the internet, it’s everywhere. You have no way to prevent this.

You can ask users for their download code to check they have bought it, who knows if they’ve used it more than once or not? You can’t know.

Imagine you set out two months worth of work, just to give it away for free, allowing anyone to download your hard work, free and easy for a bit of publicity?
It’s a good marketing strategy and a lot of people do it. Think about that before setting every moment trying to fight piracy. My themes and code snippits are probably getting downloaded elsewhere, nothing I can do, and there is nothing I’m going to do.

That’s life, it’s unfair.

You make it seem like we’re the only ones loosing out due to piracy?

By 2008 TPB had “stolen” $46,000,000,000,000”

The amount of money that has been put it to people stealing items is billions. Money that I’m pretty sure envanto doesn’t have to spend.

Data is just a set of zeros and ones in a correct sequence you can make something, so if someone mashed 0 and 1 and came out with your item (Not likely at all… but still) would that count as stealing?

And also don’t forget piracy has gone on for so, so, so many years

Such as… how to pirate a vinyl, that’s been going on for years.

BenSheppard said
You make it seem like we’re the only ones loosing out due to piracy?

By 2008 TPB had “stolen” $46,000,000,000,000”

The amount of money that has been put it to people stealing items is billions. Money that I’m pretty sure envanto doesn’t have to spend.

Data is just a set of zeros and ones in a correct sequence you can make something, so if someone mashed 0 and 1 and came out with your item (Not likely at all… but still) would that count as stealing?

And also don’t forget piracy has gone on for so, so, so many years

Such as… how to pirate a vinyl, that’s been going on for years.

Haha…lol! That is so cool to see :))). Yeah…perhaps ACTA was bad beacuse it was way too tight and basically would have forced everybody to stop doing stuff on the web, but I think we would need a part of that program actually going on.

Anyway, thanks a lot Ben your posts really made my day a touch better. It pays off to see things with a chocolate coating at times.

Cheers

Nothing can be done. You’ll lose even more money if you spend time fighting piracy, because that time will be wasted.

Just accept the fact that you can’t win this war so don’t even fight it.

Most of the people that download themes from warez sites won’t buy from you if they couldn’t find your item on warez sites. Focus on creating awesome work and everything should do just fine, we can find excuses for failures anytime.

WPScientist said
Nothing can be done. You’ll lose even more money if you spend time fighting piracy, because that time will be wasted. Just accept the fact that you can’t win this war so don’t even fight it.

+1

FinalDestiny said
Most of the people that download themes from warez sites won’t buy from you if they couldn’t find your item on warez sites. Focus on creating awesome work and everything should do just fine, we can find excuses for failures anytime.

That is very true. I wasn’t searching for any, was just stunned about the massive amount of copyrighted items I could find. Stunningly idiotic.

Cheers

Just adding my 2 cents here.

Most warez sites have other intentions when giving away your themes for free, they will add malicious code into the themes so its easy to hack your site, steal passwords, steal money etc, the list goes on.

Also a lot of people that download your theme from warez sites are probably just ‘try before you buy’ sort of people. Probably testing the theme out on a localhost before they come to themeforest to make a purchase.

Anybody using a Warez theme as a production website deserves everything they get, e.g website hacked after hours spent modifying the theme and the worst being, money stolen!!

Anybody that is serious about there website will end up coming to themeforest anyway. so i wouldn’t be too worried about the warez sites giving away your theme for ‘free’ in fact they are probably doing you a favor!!

Hope this puts your mind at rest and drives you to keep making awesome themes!!

- Antech